Max had been looking at me really strangely, so I stopped on my way back into the kitchen to look at myself in the little mirror over the key rack. I checked to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently left a dusting of eyeshadow on my cheeks and then accidentally smudged it with my fingers, making myself look like an exhausted NFL linebacker in overtime. I hadn’t. Just to be extra sure, I wet my fingertips and swiped them underneath my eyes. Everything looked normal. I looked a bit flushed, but still like me. I checked my teeth. Nothing green. I looked down at my girls. Everybody in place. So, I figured that whatever was going on with Max had to be the heat. He’d been out there all day, and it was a hot one—out here, surrounded by the trees, it was like being in a huge greenhouse. I turned up the AC on the thermometer pad and made my way into the kitchen.

Which was a disaster. The whole place was, really. Not dirty, just chaotic. Not so very long ago, but long enough not to hurt me too much to think of it, the house belonged to my grandma. The plan was to get it turned around to sell, but it wasn’t going to be easy. It needed new windows, new doors, and electrical wires that weren’t wrapped in…wait for it…tar-soaked cotton, which had apparently been all the rage in 1891. Charming. The house was like a Pandora’s box of trips to Home Depot, because the more work I did, the more work I realized I needed to do.

The house needed more than I could do on my own—I wasn’t afraid of some shoddy wiring, I’m from New England, for God’s sake—but there was a limit. I was a children’s book illustrator, not an ancient-house rebuilder. But Max wouldn’t let me hire some cut-rate yahoo from two towns over to do the work—he absolutely would not let me. He got all fired up when I said I was thinking about hiring a company called Tom’s Handymen from Bar Harbor. He’d looked at me like I’d lost all my common sense—like I’d gone completely bananas. “Rosie. Give me a break. That guy would fuck up a planter box,” he’d said, swigging his beer one night when we were out for Wednesday trivia. “Let me have a look.”

“I can’t pay you, you know that.” I’d fished the last of the cashews from the beer nuts. “And I won’t let you work for free.”

“Just a look,” he’d said…

…Three weeks ago.

So now here I was, with my best friend fixing up my ancient Mother Goose house, and I had no way to pay him. So I did what I could. Snacks. Water. Moral support. The occasional splinter removal. Probably annoying comments about safety. Sunscreen. Insistence on him wearing a baseball cap. I couldn’t afford much, but lunch? I could always make sure he had a good lunch. It was free to fuss over him, so I did. Drawing pictures of tiny snails in shoes sailing to the moon on matchboxes didn’t pay much, but it definitely covered bread, ham, and turkey.

I laid out the sandwiches on the cutting board by the sink and put mustard squiggles on the bread, but I couldn’t find a knife that wasn’t waiting for me to wash it in the sink. In the three weeks since I’d moved in, I’d learned that my gram’s method of organizing was, in a phrase, completely haphazard, especially in the kitchen. I was as likely to find a butter knife mixed up with her dozens of wood spoons as I was to find a Cuisinart blade in the napkin drawer. Looking for the meat cleaver? Try the drawer with the extra lids. Need a fork? Probably in the pantry. Finally, though, I did find a knife, tangled up in some whisks. I spread the mustard evenly, and I made sure Max’s sandwiches had double meat. And that’s when I heard the other thing my gram had left for me, with heavy footsteps approaching from behind.

Julia Caesar.

Grandma’s will had been short and sweet. “I leave to my granddaughter, Rosie Madden, all my worldly possessions, and also my cat, Julia Caesar. Really sorry about that, honey. I thought for sure I’d outlive her. Love you. Cupcake recipe is in the pantry.”

As I cut the sandwiches on the diagonal, I heard Julia’s footsteps approaching with all the delicacy of a bulldog’s. She didn’t patter; she thumped. She didn’t creep; she trundled. She didn’t meow; she grunted. I glanced over my shoulder at her, and she stopped and looked away, contemplating a chair leg as if that’s exactly what she’d been doing all along. It was her standard MO: pretend to be doing anything other than looking at the human. She was completely gray, except for a small white splotch on her side, in roughly the same shape as Florida. Or a machete.

I turned away again, and the thump-thump of her paws started up once more. Rather than trying to catch her in the act—it totally fascinated me, could she feel me watching her?—I became mesmerized watching Max doing something with the saw outside. A spray of sawdust shot back at him, sticking to his sweaty biceps.

That wasn’t P90X sexy. That was 100% Max Doyle sexy.

Oh my God, that’s Max. Just Max, I thought as I rinsed my hands in the sink. But before I could sneak another look at Max—had his triceps always been that defined?—Julia leaped up onto the windowsill and hid him from view, sending a bottle of dish soap tumbling from the sill into the sink. Above Julia’s substantial bulk, not unlike that of a small, furry pig, I saw the glint of his tanned skin in the sun. Truthfully, it was getting harder and harder not to stare. Maybe he wasn’t actually doing P90X on the down low, but he looked it. He’d always been handsome, but now he was looking pretty much…perfect.

I watched him pull his T-shirt off his head and toss it aside, revealing a chiseled back and even more defined shoulders.

No, Rosie. No, no, no.

The saw squealed to life, and I leaned around Julia to watch his muscles flex.

Yes.

No. No.

Clearly, Julia didn’t think I should be secretly ogling him either. She was, right then, staring at me with all the intensity of a special ops CIA interrogator fired for using, you know, torture, and glancing slowly from the pantry to me and back again, and—I kid you not—at the oven clock. Lunchtime was upon us.

“PS: Honey be careful around 12:05pm. Julia is very serious about lunch. Okay, love you!”

My gram, for all her lovely qualities, had raised Julia to be only semi-domesticated. And she only ate three things: small pieces of banana, peanuts, and SPAM.

Julia tucked herself up into a ball, like she was ready to spring. I brandished my butter knife, more to point at her than to defend myself, but a girl never could be too careful. We’d been down this road, and I was out of Band-Aids.

“We talked about this,” I told her, waving the knife in the air like a gigantic finger. “No more SPAM. The vet told me your sodium levels are the same as a canned sardine’s.”

Julia swatted the sponge off the ledge, and it landed in the sink. Fools!

“I’m with you. But it’s for your own good.”

In response—Wait until the Revolution comes! You bipeds are so hosed!—she whapped the kitchen window with her tail so hard that Max turned to look. Julia’s tail had the same force as a pair of human knuckles. Intense.

Max shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun and leaned in, peering through the window at me. “You knock?” he said, his deep voice carrying right through the single panes.

Julia eyed me. Her tail made an ominous S. As in, S for sucker!

“PPS: If lunch is delayed, Neosporin is in the cabinet! Next to the Nu Skin!”

But not even my fear of Julia was greater than my desire to stare at Max. Glinting in the sun was the broken heart necklace I’d given him when the engraving shop at the mall had closed in high school. I’d bought it for 75% off, and it had been sort of tongue-in-cheek. We weren’t the people who wore broken hearts, but he’d loved it. Especially the engraving Max & Rosie Forever. His half had my name, my half had his. I hadn’t seen my half in years. But his still hung from his neck. Battered, almost illegible, and now almost seventeen years old. In all that time, he’d never, ever taken it off.

Julia opened her eyes so I saw both her irises were rimmed with white. She looked like a silent-movie version of Dracula, about to go in for the jugular.

I got back to making lunch and gave Max a single finger in the air to say lunch was coming right up. He went back to his chop saw, skin glistening, and the old chain of his necklace catching the sun.

A deep lion-like roar emanated from somewhere in Julia’s massive chest. A needlepoint my gram had ditched mid-project floated through my memory. Ask not at whom the cat roars. It roars at thee.

“I’m on it, General. Hold your fire.”

Her tail went around in a spiral, and she blinked once. I opened up a can of tuna in water and put it into a dish for her. She’d gone on hunger strike over Fancy Cat, and I’d decided that it was probably best to wean her off her salt-and-processed-meat diet slowly rather than to send her into renal failure by cutting out the salt all at once. So in the spirit of step-by-step, I offered her a small piece of deli ham as an appetizer. I placed it between her furry paws. “There, that’s low sodium.”

She lowered her pink nose to it, flattening her ears. And promptly swatted it into the sink with a splat.

“Suit yourself,” I told her, and I added two cupcakes to the lunch tray. Because in my book, nothing was complete without cupcakes. Nothing.

* * *

I sat in the grass with my feet in the sun, and Max sat on an old bench partly shaded by an enormous magnolia in flower. Julia lumbered outside and made a big dramatic thing of flinging herself into the old tire swing I used to use when I was little. She left her head hanging out in an over-the-top, I am starving to death, send help, protest.

I ignored her histrionics and considered the piles of lumber, the rows of power tools, and Max’s truck parked next to my Bug. What he should’ve been doing with his time, I knew, was paying work, for paying customers, with things like budgets and timelines and houses that didn’t eat money like a paper shredder that wouldn’t turn off. “We have to talk about this. I’m not a charity.”

Max took a huge bite of his sandwich, chewed a few times, and then wiped his mouth with his hand. “Will you stop it?”

I flopped back into the grass, looking at him upside down. “I don’t like it. It’s not a fair trade, and I know that whatever you say, you do need the money. Just think, right now you could be building a deck for a millionaire and overcharging him for labor. Living the dream!”

He shook his head at me, chewing and smiling. But even after he swallowed, he didn’t answer right away. He held my stare for a long time, longer than I was used to. Although, I could’ve been misreading that. I was upside down. Finally, he said, “Nowhere I’d rather be than here.”

“You could be fixing the trim on some sexy housewife’s kitchen island. I can see it now…”

“Stop.”

“Pounding some nails!”

“Rosie.”

“Drilling some holes!”

“Christ.”

I sighed and looked up into the pink and white blossoms. “I mean it.”

Max finished off his sandwich and bit into an apple. “So do I. I gotta make a run to the lumberyard. How about dinner?”

The dread of that word pelted me in the stomach like a bad clam. Dinner tonight was not something I was looking forward to. At all. But it was one of those things I felt, too, had to be done. Like getting my teeth cleaned. Or going to the gynecologist. “Can’t.” I shook my head, feeling the cool grass tickle the back of my neck. “I’ve got a date.”

Max’s eyes narrowed, and his expression got hard and focused. “If it’s Tinder, I’m going with you.”

“eHarmony!” I swatted his jeans. “Lowest incidence of unwilling abduction, guaranteed.”

But Max wasn’t laughing. He was still dead serious. He always got this way about my dating, especially when it came to the internet. Totally the overprotective older brother. “I don’t like it, Rosie.”

Neither did I. But I knew love wasn’t going to land in my lap. I wasn’t going to open my eyes one day and find the man for me, just standing there. He wasn’t under my nose. I’d looked. And I wanted to find someone desperately. If I didn’t, I had visions of Julia Caesar and me living together in a perpetual death match, eating our deli meats and staring at each other over the kitchen table, forever and ever amen.

Max tossed his apple core into the woods and turned his attention to the cupcake. This one was chocolate with pink icing, and he was man enough to make it look as natural as a cold beer. He peeled off the paper wrapper carefully and took a big bite and then perched the cupcake on his knee. “I’ll stay low unless you need backup. In which case…” He smacked his tanned fist into his massive palm.

“No, I’m okay.” I spread my toes in the sun and peeled back the paper on the second cupcake. “I’m a big girl. If it comes down to it, I can throw a drink in his face myself.”

* * *

As Max drove away from my house, I put on a pair of rubber gloves from under the sink. I turned the faucet on hot, but even over the running water, I heard my phone buzz. I tapped the screen with my elbow, and it lit up, showing me an alert from my bank.

My bank. God, I hated my bank.

I mean, not my bank itself. The place was nice enough—they had free mints, the chairs were pretty comfy, and they gave you a complimentary pen if you made a balance transfer—but the idea of money in general had started to be a real hang-up up for me. Because I had none. At all. I dribbled soap into the sink, and the tiny islands of grease scattered. Perfect example: my thoughts were the dishwater, the bank was the soap, and whenever the two came in contact, my mind scurried off to something, anything else. Because the news was never good. Every free mint in the world didn’t offset the truth.

The anxiety about the alert was enough to make me peel off my gloves and check what it might be about. My heart dropped as my balance lit up the page. I didn’t even attempt to make sense of the numbers—only the colors. Where once there had been a modest positive balance in green, there was now a fairly substantial negative balance…in red. A check I’d paid to the city for property tax had cleared, but I had no steady income to balance it out. I had finally moved into the red. I scrolled through my unpaid bill notices, and I felt sicker and sicker. I also felt the impending panic welling up in me that had become so very familiar. I flipped my phone over, stuck it on the windowsill next to Julia, and put my gloves back on.

Into the hot water, I plunged the cupcake tin, with chocolate batter all stuck to the top of the pan. The soap hissed and fizzled, and I wiped my nose with my forearm. My eyes moved up to a needlepoint my gram had made years ago. “May your soufflé rise up to meet you, may expiration dates be always at your back. May you remember the difference between baking soda and baking powder, and may every mistake you make be easily hidden under the miracle known as buttercream.”

Amen.

That was where I was, I realized. At miracle-hoping stage. Praying for a change of fortunes from a needlepoint hanging in a house that looked like a stage set for a movie version of The Old Woman Who Lived in the Shoe.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” I told Julia as I plunged my gloved hands into the hot soap and water. Her tail moved slowly through the air, and she met my gaze for one fleeting instant. She had weirdly pronounced eyebrows for a cat, and she used them all the time. Right at that moment, they were…kind of furrowed. Sometimes she reminded me of Henry Kissinger, but I never told her so. She knocked the Dawn off of the shelf into the sink again. It bobbed along next to a wooden spoon, and the label became wet and half-translucent.

I rescued the soap and thought about what to do next. I was stuck in that precarious and unfortunate purgatory between doing what I loved—children’s book illustrations—and what I knew paid better—commercial graphic design (also known as the most soul-sucking artistic work that ever was, ever). Designing smiling toilets, immediately recognizable corn cobs, and mind-numbingly dull logos for law offices sucked my soul away one sans-serif letter at a time. My love was in adorable illustrations of outlandish things—I could not exist on ten thousand minor modifications of a generic waste-management logo. I could not.

But I was starting to worry that I didn’t have any other choice. I tried to calm myself with washing the dishes, usually a surefire way to put me in a better mood, but today it had the opposite effect. And before I knew it, I’d damn near rubbed the logo off of a complimentary mug from the store where my gram always bought her tea. I noticed that in my scrubbing frenzy, I’d splashed the envelope that contained my electricity bill. It made the envelope look as if I’d spattered it with tears.

Looking out at Boston Post Road, I saw a plume of dust coming toward the house. I froze with my sponge scrunched into one of the cupcake holes. Max. Max would totally know what to do about this. He’d give me good, sensible, Max-like advice. Maybe now it was time to level with him about the money situation. He’d be appalled, and he’d try to stuff money into my wallet. But at least it wouldn’t be my own private nightmare anymore.

Only, it wasn’t Max. Through the dust I saw the front end, not of his big Chevy, but instead a different truck. Shiny white, no mud on the fenders, chrome that glinted in the sun, a front license plate that wasn’t rusted from the salt air.

I rinsed off my rubber gloves, turned off the faucet, and draped the gloves over the edge of the sink. As the dust cleared, I looked to see who it might be. There emerged a very, very pudgy man with a very, very bad comb-over, in very, very poorly fitting dad jeans. He didn’t know I could see him, so he didn’t know I was watching him as he spritzed something into his hair. Hairspray, maybe.

“Stay here,” I told Julia.

By way of a reply, she swatted the dish soap back into the sink with a plop.

“Good girl.”

As I stepped outside, I could smell the man’s cologne from way downwind. It was…terrible. I could feel it on my tongue, it was that thick. A gust of wind kicked up, and the odor damn near knocked me back into the house. But I hadn’t been raised to say things like, Good God, man, what is that smell? Think them, yep. But not say them. “Can I help you?”

He shuffled toward me. “Frank Bremmer.” He extended a hand. The handshake wasn’t too bad, actually. Not fish-like or limp or anything. Maybe a little sticky, but nice enough.

He pulled his wallet from his pants and thumbed through the compartments, looking for something. As he looked down, I realized it hadn’t been hairspray. It had been—I wasn’t even sure of the word—scalp spray, of some sort, to disguise his thinning hair. In the sunshine, it had a very, very strange effect. Like someone had drawn on his hair with a spray gun or a really thick Sharpie.

“Your real estate agent sent me over,” he said, without looking at me, but instead assessing the house. Still without looking at me, he held a business card out in the air. The logo was one I recognized immediately as a $39.99 pre-made from biznislogos.com

“Oh, geez.” Somehow, I’d imagined that this would happen later, after Max had more time to make repairs. But I’d also asked for quick sale, and I realized I couldn’t have my cupcakes and eat them, too. The image of my red balance flashed to mind. “Right. Please. Go ahead. Don’t hit your head on the door frames. They’re really low.”

Bremmer shuffled over to the side of the house and gave the siding a hard kick. The wood crumbled away, and what I recognized immediately as termites scampered out.

“You sure you wanna sell this thing?” He poked at some of the crumbling cedar shingles with a stubby thumb.

“That’s the idea.”

He scratched his head, and a small patch of his marker hair came off on his fingers. “This is what we in the inspection business call a gallon-of-gas-and-a-book-of-matches job.”

For all love. “I’m not in the insurance fraud business, if you can believe it.”

He sniffed hard and nodded at me somewhat sadly. “Understood. So I’ll have a poke around, shall I?” He took a pen from his front pocket and a clipboard from inside of his truck.

“Don’t poke too hard,” I said.

But he’d already started to make notes on his checklist.

* * *

By the time he’d finished, he was sweating so hard that his spray-on hair was coming down onto his cheeks like rivulets of watery mud. I handed him a bottle of water and a few paper napkins. I didn’t want to make a big thing of the hair situation, so I just said, “It’s a hot one.”

“I’ll say,” he puffed. He gulped down the bottle of water and dabbed at his hair paint. Then he unclipped the top sheet from his clipboard and handed it to me.

I looked at the list, and my jaw dropped. It was packed with so many notes, written in an aggressive, ballpoint, all-caps style that made it look like he was yelling, and so many checkmarks in the major issues column that I had to blink twice to make sure I was seeing it correctly. Re-anchor the banisters, replace the water heater, fix gutters, replace termite-damaged areas. Grandma’s fairy-tale cottage had gotten through inspection with a big fat F. “Is there any good news?” I asked as I tried to divert my eyes from the words suspected structural flaw—north wall of foundation.

He dabbed at his head with the paper towel and made a face like he was about to tell me I had a very inconvenient but not terminal disease. “No lead paint, no asbestos. But Christ, Miss Madden,” he lowered his voice like we were talking about my house behind her back, “I’ll give you the fifteen smackers for the gas and the matches myself. This isn’t a fixer-upper. This is a bringer-downer.”

Maybe so, but what good old Frank of the melting hair couldn’t understand, though, was that I needed to sell this house. I needed whatever it would pay me. And anyway, I couldn’t torch my gram’s place. Julia would never forgive me.

“It’s going to have to be a fixer-upper.” I folded the crinkly inspection paper in half.

“If you say so,” he said and dabbed at his hair a bit more.